Nov 7, 2012

I took part in the intense, weeklong Rugged Summit this spring. Rugged as in Rugged Software. Rugged Software as in secure and robust software. The major outcome of the summit and the homework afterwards was a strawman of The Rugged Handbook. It's free, available here (as docx).My main contribution to the handbook was being lead author of The Rugged Developer chapter. I'd like to share it with you as a stand-alone blog post below. Hopefully you can give me and the other authors some feedback!

The Rugged Developer

As a Rugged Developer, I want my software to be secure against attacks, interference, corruption, random events, and more.To achieve my goals I have come to value...

Software Quality over Security Products

Defensive Code over Patching

Ruggedizing Your Own Systems over Waiting To Be Hacked

Your Mission as a Rugged Developer

Good news – you're already Rugged ... in part. We developers do all sorts of things to ensure our code is robust and maintainable. To become a fully rugged developer you only need to add security to the quality goals you try to achieve.The interesting part of security is that you're protecting your code against intelligent adversaries, not just random things. So in addition to being robust against chaotic users and errors in other systems, your code also has to withstand attacks from people who really know the nuts and bolts of your programming languages, your frameworks, and your deployment platform.Being a Rugged developer means you have a key role in your project’s security story. The story should tell you what security defenses are available, when they are to be used, and how they are to be used. Your job is to ensure these things happen. You should also strive to integrate security tests into your development life cycle, and even try to hack your own systems. Better you than a “security” guy or bad guy, right?

Ideas for Being an Effective Rugged Developer

Add Security Unit Tests. Perhaps you've been to security training or you've read a blog post on a new attack form. Make it a habit of trying to add unit tests for attack input you come across. They will add to your negative testing and make your application more robust. A certain escape character, for instance ', may be usable in a nifty security exploit but just as well produce numerous of errors for benign users. A user registration with the name Olivia O'Hara should not fizzle your SQL statement execution. You as a developer have the deepest knowledge of how the system is designed and implemented and thus you are in the best position to implement and test security.Model Your Data Instead of Using Strings. Almost nothing is just a string. Strings are super convenient for representing input, but they are also capable of transmitting source code, SQL statements, escape characters, null values, markup etc. Write wrappers around your strings and narrow down what they can contain. Even if you don't spend time on a draconic regular expressions or check for syntax and semantics, a simple input restriction to unicode letters + digits + simple punctuation may prove extremely powerful against attacks. Attackers love string input. Rugged developers deny them the pleasure.Hack Your Own Systems. Even more fun, do it with your team. If management has a problem, tell them it's better you do it than someone on the outside.Get Educated. There are many materials available to help you learn secure coding, including websites, commercial secure coding training, and vulnerable applications like WebGoat. Also, although top lists can be lame, the OWASP Top 10 and CWE Top 25 are great places to start. As luck would have it, most of the issues in these lists are concrete and you can take action in code today. There are a lot more good materials available at both OWASP and MITRE. Make Sure You Patch Your Application Frameworks and Libraries. Know which frameworks and libraries you use (Struts, Spring, .NET MVC, jQuery etc) and their versions. Make sure your regression test suite allows you to upgrade frameworks quickly. Make sure you get those patch alerts. A framework with a security bug can quickly open up several or all your applications to attacks. All the major web frameworks have been found to have severe security bugs the last two years so the problem is very much a reality today.

Metrics

The Rugged Developer should evaluate success based on how well their code stands up to both internal and external stresses. How many weaknesses are discovered after the code is released for testing? How often are mistakes repeated? How long does it take to remediate a vulnerability? How many security-related test cases are associated with a project?